


BBCSH 'Wall' Part 5/6  [NC-17]

by tigersilver



Series: 'Wall' [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-12
Updated: 2012-03-12
Packaged: 2017-11-01 20:52:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/361105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigersilver/pseuds/tigersilver





	BBCSH 'Wall' Part 5/6  [NC-17]

[This is where it becomes squirrly and we diverge into AU-land entirely. Please forgive. If I had the data at hand, likely this would be written entirely differently. If you are looking for canon, please move along, thank you.)

  


V. 

John’s reaction to the yarn is purely deadpan. Well…he does grin at it as he ducks his ways through, retrieving his bag after pronouncing Sherlock’s minor wounds ‘good as they can be’.  He also grimaces and advises Sherlock to ‘take care, though I know you won’t, sod you.’

Sherlock’s thrilled to pieces. 

Meanwhile he’s done his best to discard the superficialities, the accoutrements, the social camouflage and the guises that have always been his bread-and-butter. To discard, one must first describe as much as humanly possible, so one knows what bits to cast away as non-essential…. Or inhumanly possible, were he the freak Sally claims he is. He’s not, though. Thanks to John. To wit:

Moriarity, stripped down to skin and bone, is clearly a social climber, possessing a high IQ, is amoral and has a social circle that has impinged upon Sherlock’s once upon a time (Carl Powers; geographic locus)—and thus, the Holmes family—from years ago. This indicates he was a near neighbor in the county or possibly even a schoolmate at primary, is likely either older or younger than Sherlock by some years as well, as he’s not a peer Sherlock recalls or has record of. Younger, actually—there’s a certain air of hero worship to account for and he seems to be only marginally aware of Mycroft, who should logically be far more of target than Sherlock. Social climber (and product of such) because he’s very obviously wearing his money on his back; the more established  (read Old Guard) families don’t bother with that much at all, as they care for their possessions and often keep them in use for ages. High intelligence quotient because geeks tend to gather into certain subsets of their own and nerds run in loose packs ‘round the same type of occupations when still considered as children: chess clubs and debating as opposed to rugby, choir, chem and drama as opposed to poly-sci and econ. Science, maths and classical Greek, then. Is likely arising of trade instead of academia, as wealth and clout appear to be Moriarity’s yardstick of success and finally—finally, and here’s the crux of this, there’s a very personal touch to this, so Sherlock has probably somehow affronted Moriarity. In passing, as he’s no memory whatsoever of ever meeting him previous the pool. He’s more than likely ignored or refused him, possibly even socially or sexually, and Moriarity assuredly cannot abide _that_.  

And to wit: John is a wonder, Sherlock is convinced of that. He’s sought to catalogue all the many ways in which he finds John intriguing and attractive and he can’t even begin without losing his way in charming tangents. It’s…rather delightfully pleasant, the process of immersion. As his wall is now a total travesty he’s resigned himself prowling freely all about his flatmate’s construction, occupying himself with a multitude of details, from counting John’s lashes to listing mentally all the many interesting ways in which his hair will tuft up in the mornings and his pants will sag when he scratches at his trim belly.  

There’s a studied pattern to his process of dual triangulation. With a light hand on the reins—the warp and the weft of his yarns—Sherlock draws it all together, his impressions and his observations, like so, moving from gross generality to fine specifics: 

  1. Structures: Wall and web. 


  1. _Wall_ in place for quite all of his life. A given and necessary mechanism.  Now disintegrating in relation to one singular man.
  2. _Web_ a habit for enforcing order, graphically. Webs upon webs upon webs _over_ time but seldom one that stays before his eyes for any _length_ of time.  Moriarity’s collection is sparse and pathetic visually as compared to John’s and that’s not for lack of physical evidence, either. Statistically, John’s more important, then. 


  1. Superficialities and Appearances: of eminent significance to _Sherlock_
    1. John’s pants are a prize. Sherlock is immensely proud of himself for having possession of them. John’s pants are part of _his_ wall and now Sherlock had stolen himself a chunk of it, with John’s tacit permission.
    2. Sherlock himself does not wear pants; they ruin the lines of his trousers. In this habit, he is more vulnerable than John, which may go a long way to explaining the state of his wall and one of the primary foci of his Wall of John. 
    3. Moriarity’s expensive suiting is a shell. He’s a beetle shielding himself behind an increasingly thin carapace and one good stomp will squash him. Other measures will be necessary for his hanger’s on and associates, though, and to that end Sherlock must take to expose the whole of Moriarity’s web.  
    4. Sherlock tends to strip people down in layers, forensically, and he has grown so accustomed to only viewing the trees, he sometimes is clobbered by the whole of the forest falling silent on his head. 
    5. John is a forest. 
    6. Sherlock’s beloved coat is a shell, also.  His, however, wears like armor and it is much more resistant to bashes and dings. 
  2. Sherlock is a _whole_ person. Whole, whole, whole and entire. It is increasingly clear to him that there is not one part of him that can be separated successfully from another, not one atom that can be truly isolated. He is him, from toes to bollocks to collarbone to cowlicks and curls. His brain, that great engine that drives him, is no more an island archipelago than his cock, which has rather startlingly made itself known again with the advent of John in his life. 
    1. All of a piece he may be, but he is not a complete unit, nonetheless. There’s a John-shaped area of him that seems to be expanding daily. 
    2. The John-shaped piece is nebulous and fuzzy, attuned to John-waves, and it requires an actual John to be fully functional. Like a magnet, it won’t work properly without something to attract or repel. Or a torch, requiring batteries…or a—there are far too many examples of symbiots to recount. 
    3. Logically, this leaves a fair amount of Sherlock dysfunctional in the purest sense of the word. The John-shaped bits are still Sherlock and without them performing Sherlock cannot perform…not even his brain. If he attempts, it’s much the same as attempting to survive without his mitochondria. Can’t be done…can’t be done. 
  3. Sherlock—like Moriarity—is hyper-aware of himself. He is his own first acid test. 
    1. Having become aware of this previously unsuspected anomaly of his anatomy, the more he thinks of John, the more all of him wants John. Craves him, needs, desires. 
    2. Moriarity shows signs of regarding Sherlock in much the same way as Sherlock regards John.  Excepting when he pulls his amour’s pigtails, he rips out sections of the tender scalp beneath and delights in it. Sherlock has never once intended to damage John with his ways—indeed, he is most solicitous of John, in all the many ways he knows and all the many ways John teaches by example.
    3. John is himself and remains John, no matter what Sherlock or Moriarity may or could do to him to affect change. 
  4. John’s wall must come down.  At least enough to test Sherlock’s hypothesis about magnets and gravity. John’s wall must conversely stay up, because Moriarity exists. 
  5. Moriarity _must_ be eliminated or neutralized. He’s not a control, he’s a wild card and his effects are likely to be negative in the both the long and short views. His target is Sherlock but the damage to Sherlock’s perimeter as he attacks in days to come (he will attack, no question) will be collateral and will absolutely include John. _And_ Mrs Hudon, and likely Lestrade and any other of Sherlock’s acquaintance he can strike, the bastard. 
  6. Sherlock …must remain Sherlock, and he must remain wholly so, which means he _must_ be entirely shed of Moriarity, as a healthy man needs to be shed of cancerous cells. Or he will lose the area of him that is John to internal decay and that is not to be borne. He may as well be dead if that worst-possible of scenarios should come to pass. 



Having posited Moriarity’s likely identity, having charted yet more of his Wall of John (now the Wall of Sherlock-and-John), Sherlock acts. He texts his brother, first thing. 

The cast is changed to a walking cast at four weeks post-pool. At six weeks it’s a light brace for his ankle and he’s been pushing himself through the therapy so he can run nearly as fast as he used to. John appears fully recovered and Mycroft has moved them from 221B to a safe house, far from Baker Street. The entire street’s been cleared out by Mycroft’s machine, actually, from Mrs Turner and her ‘married ones’ to a highly gratified Mrs Hudson, now on a government funded holiday. This last at John’s insistence and with Sherlock’s full agreement. He can’t afford to be fussed by John’s anxiety over their neighbors and landlady. And John’s happy with him, so he’s happy, too. 

Really, once he’s understood it, it’s all very simple and easy to manage.

Not that Sherlock’s not got a lot of irons in the fire: he and Mycroft, with Anthea’s and John’s help, have narrowed down the pool of suspects (social climber, Carl Powers, geographic locus of formative years; knew Sherlock in passing or by reputation; nouveau- _riche_ and then richer by criminal design, a several years younger man than Sherlock but same general circles as the Holmes’s and so on: education, interests, connections; they all add up) to a shrinking point. There’s only one man who really fits, via process of elimination. Once that’s been accomplished it’s not terribly hard to trace the attendant money and money is Moriarity’s lifeblood, the pulse that drives his machine.  Their web closes in, a sticky fly paper drawing taut round a struggling beetle. 

On the John-front, he’s taking advantage of the privacy afforded by house-arrest and a pied a terre in a part of London where no one knows the sight of either of them.  They can still go about if they are careful and Sherlock introduces his John to the art of disguises. That’s a bit fun. 

Still, it’s a petri-dish experiment sort, this safe house. A rigorous study, with a very rapid return on chemical results: he and John are thrown together 24/7 and if John’s still the same with Sherlock after this long a time spent in this certain way, as in not dilute nor concentrated, then Sherlock—logically—is conclusively just as much as part of John’s web as John is part of his. There’s no change in composition; they match the control. John. Sherlock. Apart and singly or together, they are—as Sherlock has long been suspecting—quite one and the same material, having already been realigned in polarity from the very start. They…match, dovetail and are mutually mixed.

John’s wall is his wall and his wall is John’s, then. Sherlock has nothing to fret about. It’s really rather romantic, in as far as Sherlock understands the term ‘romance’. 

It only remains to inform John of all his findings on their interpersonal, interdependent, mutually symbiotic relationship they own between them. And reveal his further extrapolations concerning wholeness of self and ‘areas’. 

The question is…how? 

Sherlock Googles. He Googles porn, specifically. Expert advice is called for. It’s been a while.

  



End file.
